Dual Mining Ethereum and ZCash (or other equihash coin)

When I was setting up to move my nvidia ethereum mining rig over to a ZCash mining rig, I accidentally started the EWBF ZEC miner before I had shut down the Claymore Ethereum miner – and what I saw surprised me.

On my Windows 10 GPU mining rig, both of the programs were running without issue, my power usage had only gone up 1 or 3 watts (my power monitor was showing 171 watts but now it seems to go between 172 and 174 watts).

GPU Mining Rig mining with Ethereum Only

When mining purely Ethereum, my rig was using 171 watts and averaging 46 mH/s. According to ethereum mining profit calculators, it shows daily profit of anywhere from $1.67 to $1.90.

GPU Mining Rig Dual Mining Ethereum and ZenCash

When mining with Ethereum and ZenCash, calculating gets a little more difficult because there are 2 coins to consider. How do we split the power? I’m not sure, but since power costs are the same it doesn’t matter too much as it will be cutting back profit from one or the other in the calculators. I split power right down the middle and calculated daily mining profit potential with these figures:
Total Power: 174 watts

ZenCash: 87 watts, 205 sol/s

Ethereum: 87 watts, 27 mH/s (27 is conservative – it bounces around from 26-30 and is reported by the mining pool as being mostly 28 and above)

With those numbers, daily profit is $0.60 for ZenCash, and $1.19 for Ethereum. Total is $1.79 for dual mining ZCash and Ethereum.

What now? What should I mine?

Since these numbers all come from 2 GTX1060 GPUs that have been overclocked to mine the most ETH for the least power usage, there’s likely more ZenCash mining speed I can get out of the cards. I will start to monitor the sol/s hashrate and adjust the settings to see if I can increase the daily return. I would like to be able to dual mine, or simply mine ZenCash and get more profit than simply mining Ethereum – which is why I started testing out equihash speeds in the first place.

Very interested in your tuning results, as I have been running a 6 x 1060 rig for the last 8 months with good success ETH-SIA using 80 to 87% power settings, -100 GPU clock, +712 GPU memory clock using MSI Afterburner to manage the GPU settings – which has proven to be rock steady at 725 to 885+watts.
Now with SIA diff skyrocketing…. looking to switch over the ZCL- ZEN- ZEC under a dual mining SW setup. Regards.

I actually switched over to mining ZenCash about a month ago, I don’t change coins as often as I probably should to maximize profitability, but I am mining and hodling so I pick a coin I like the future of and mine it and hold it. Once ZenCash goes up 50X then I won’t feel so bad about losing a few cents a day compared to some other coin 🙂